take away and harder to defend than persons, that should be most
respected which is most easily ravished; or again, because property is
the true foundation of civil society, and the true guarantee of the
engagements of the citizens; for if property did not answer for
persons, nothing would be so easy as to elude duties and to laugh at
the laws."[Footnote: Rousseau, _Oeuvres_, xii. 41.] And further
on, in the same article, he calls property the foundation of the social
compact, whose first condition is that every one be maintained in the
peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him. We must not wonder at seeing
Rousseau thus change sides from day to day. A dreamer and not a
philosophic thinker, he perceived some truths and uttered many
sophistries, speaking always with the fire of conviction and a fatal
eloquence.

It is needless to enter into the detail of Rousseau's life at this
time, the time when his most remarkable work was done. Labor was
always painful and irritating to him, and it was perhaps the
irksomeness of his tasks that drove him into something not unlike
madness.[Footnote: There is little doubt that Rousseau was at one time
really insane, subject to the delusion that he was being persecuted.
His insanity did not become very marked until the time of the real
persecutions undergone after the publication of _Emile_. See his
Biographies and _Le Docteur Chatelain, La folie de J. J. Rousseau_,
Paris, 1890. He was, of course, always eccentric and ill balanced; and
was often rendered irritable by a painful disease, caused by a
malformation of the bladder. Morley, _Rousseau_, i. 277, etc.
_Oeuvres_, xviii. 155 (_Conf._ Part. ii. liv. viii.).]

Yet he kept on writing with enthusiasm. He speaks of himself as moved in
these years by the contemplation of great objects; ridiculously hoping